TWO SLEUTHS’ EXPERIENCES

‘I felt this swelling in my chest as I realized I was being turned away from this apartment because I was black.’

As the landlady showed her a two-bedroom apartment, Sheila, a 36-year-old black woman from Mission Hills, didn’t believe that the innocent questions she was asked would lead to a housing discrimination case.

How many people would be living in the apartment? When did she need to move in? Where did she work? What did her husband do for a living?

“I told her I was a schoolteacher and that my husband worked for a gas company,” Sheila said, recounting an incident that had happened to her in her volunteer role as a checker for the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council. She had been sent to the apartment building by the council after a woman complained that she had been illegally denied the apartment.

“And then she asked me, ‘Oh, does your husband pump gas?’ ”

“ ‘No,’ I told her, ‘he’s a department manager.’ ”

At that, Sheila recounted, the landlady’s attitude immediately changed. The white landlady, Sheila sensed, assumed that the black couple held menial jobs and would not be able to afford the West Valley apartment.

“Her questions were friendly enough,” Sheila said. “But as soon as she figured out we had good jobs, could afford the apartment and we were serious about renting the place, she started making excuses,” Sheila said.

“All of the sudden she told me the apartment wasn’t ‘right’ for us. It wouldn’t be available by the date we needed it. Then she told me she was only looking for managers, not tenants for the building.

“Maybe she thought she was being smooth because she didn’t say anything derogatory,” Sheila said.

“I felt this swelling in my chest as I realized I was being turned away from this apartment because I was black,” Sheila said.

“The character I was portraying--that schoolteacher married to that gas company manager--probably represented some of the most solid, credible tenants a landlord could ask for. They made good money. They both held positions of responsibility.”

All the while, Sheila said, she kept thinking about a sign outside the building advertising a two-bedroom apartment available for immediate occupancy.

“I wanted to challenge her, to tell her that the sign out front didn’t say anything about managers only. I knew she was doing a number on me and it didn’t feel good.

“It was a painful feeling, but when you’re a checker you can’t show it,” Sheila said. “I had to force myself to stay in character when I was shocked and wanted to cry.”

‘What she was really telling me was that she wanted a nice Jewish lady, not a nice black girl, in the apartment.’

After 22 years of volunteer work with the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council, Carole believes she has has developed a simple, effective approach to following up on discrimination complaints.

“I get them chatting and let them hang themselves with their own tongue,” the 51-year-old Jewish woman from North Hollywood said of the landlords whose rental practices she is sent to investigate.

It was during a recent visit to an East Valley apartment building that she heard a casual comment that she said was the most offensive racial slur she has heard from an apartment manager in more than two decades as a checker for the council.

She arrived at the building at twilight and said the apartment manager greeted her with a smile and began to immediately warm up to her “prospective tenant,” pointing out how quiet and safe the building was. “I was very folksy and chatty like I am during all my checks,” Carole said. “And this lady seemed to like me, so I let her talk while I looked.”

As they walked through the empty apartment, Carole said, she opened closets, ran the bathtub water, looked inside the oven.

Carole said the manager told her that, minutes before her arrival, a “nice black girl” had been shown the apartment.

“She went on to say she would feel more ‘comfortable’ if I rented it. She was very friendly to me, very nice,” Carole said. “She said there was a temple right next to the building and that I would be a ‘fine’ tenant and ‘fit in’ with the others.

“What she was really telling me,” Carole said, “was that she wanted a nice Jewish lady, not a nice black girl, in the apartment.”

The manager also explained that there were several elderly women living alone in the building, Carole said.

“Then, out of the blue, she told me she was afraid that if the black girl had boyfriends, the men would wander through the building and maybe one of her tenants would get raped.”

“I was ready to punch her right there in the apartment,” Carole said.

“I thought to myself, ‘How dare you say this?’ But of course I didn’t,” Carole said, acknowledging that to do so would have unfairly elicited racial comments and destroyed her effectiveness as a checker solely out to gather information.

“I just went back to my car and wrote everything down. Furiously.”